Raelene and Dennis Hanratty milk a predominantly Jersey herd on their 194 hectare irrigated family farm at Upper Maffra West.
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Dennis is the second generation of his family to own the dairy farm, and third generation to be a dairy farmer.
His grandfather was a dairy farmer at Toora.
Raelene is a first generation dairy farmer.
When Dennis and Raelene married, they briefly became sharefarmers before returning to work on the family farm, alongside his parents.
In 2004, they became sharefarmers on the family farm; then they bought the farm in 2008.
The couple has raised seven children, most of them have worked or are working in the dairy industry.
Most recently, their youngest, Jacob, has left school to work on the family farm and learn how to eventually run it himself one day.
Alongside the home farm, Dennis and Raelene also have 30ha of irrigated country at Newry where they run their young heifers, which graze here from weaning.
They keep 70-75 replacement heifers each year, and sell the surplus calves.
The Newry farm is also used to harvest silage.
Dennis and Raelene can access 430 megalitres of high reliability water to flood irrigate the Upper Maffra West and Newry farms.
The water comes from the Lake Glenmaggie system, in the Macalister Irrigation District.
A 40.1ha of dryland country at Flynn is where the rising two-year-old Jersey heifers graze.
These cattle are joined naturally to Jersey bulls. This block is also good for harvesting hay.
The couple also leases 28ha which is where the in-calf heifers graze so the Flynn country can be rested in readiness for harvest.
“This means we harvest enough hay and silage in an average year to be self-sufficient,” Raelene said.
Dennis said he aimed to harvest 300 rolls of pasture silage and 300 rolls of hay.
“If we end up with a shortfall, if it’s been a tough year for growing enough feed, we’ll buy silage and hay,” he said.
“We also feed 360 tonne of grain pellets each year.”
Dennis relies on a rye-grass and clover mix that is suitable for irrigation, and undertakes an annual fertiliser program that includes super potash, urea and lime.
The effluent pond is also shandied and used as necessary as fertiliser on the paddocks.
“Grass is king,” Dennis said.
“Irrigation is turned off on May 15, and returns on August 15. So we dry the milking herd off over winter.”
The herd of 350 cows — 370 in a good spring and summer — is milked in a 40-bail rotary dairy on the home farm.
“It was the second rotary dairy built in the district. It was built in the 1970s,” Raelene said.
“With regular maintenance, it still works great.”
When the season tightens, and irrigation water becomes unavailable, Dennis and Raelene reduce their herd numbers.
It is several years since Dennis and Raelene bucked the trend for artificial insemination and started buying bulls to join with their cows.
“That’s given us some herd bulls to use on the heifers,” Raelene said.
The bull is put in with the heifers in October, when they are at least 14 months old.
Their focus when using AI was to source semen from bulls that complemented their herd.
Then they started buying bulls from studs.
“We rely on visual confirmation in the dairy of which cows are in heat, and the herd’s fertility rate means that in any year we have a maximum of 20 cows that are not in-calf,” Raelene said.
Their latest bull purchase was from a local farmer.
“At the end of the day, we have a commercial herd and we’re looking to make as much milk as we can,” Raelene said.
Their regime is now to use bulls and AI with conventional semen in their herd.
The 9000-litre vat in the dairy shed means collection can skip a day, except in peak season.
The herd’s production to the end of May was 1.5 million litres, or 125,000 kg milk solids.
The herd is dried off from June 20, for calving on August 1.
Jacob has his own story. See: https://www.dairynewsaustralia.com.au/news/jacobs-learning-the-ropes/
Pipeline boosts delivery
In recent years, Southern Rural Water, the key manager of irrigation water for farmers in southern Victoria, undertook modernisation of key infrastructure in the Newry Channel system.
The Hanratty farm at Upper Maffra West is at the head of the system, and the first of many farms among about 2300 hectares of country serviced by irrigation from this system.
The 36km system of irrigation channels, constructed in the 1920s, demonstrated high seepage and leakage, as well as evaporation. About 20 per cent of outflows was estimated lost to evaporation, seepage and leakage.
In the past few years, the channels have been replaced with a gravity pipeline system, reducing water loss and improving water delivery.
While it meant farming land was imposed upon for major works, the benefits have been substantial, in saving water and more efficient and effective delivery of water for stock, domestic and irrigation use.
Raelene and Dennis Hanratty’s dairy farm is the first customer on the new, and old, pipeline, so they have always benefited from pressure from the Glenmaggie Lake headwater that supplies the Main Northern Channel and flows into the Newry pipeline.
But one of the key benefits realised during the modernisation project was farm planning, offered to all farmers through SRW and the West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority.
Dennis and Raelene continue to flood irrigate both their Upper Maffra West and Newry farms. The irrigation season extends from August 15 to May 15, subject to the level of Lake Glenmaggie.
But when the irrigation water is turned off, the stock and domestic supply is still available.
“The Newry Pipeline Project created opportunities for us,” Raelene.
“Being at the head of the works, pressure has never been a problem for us.
“During the couple of years of works, there was a lot of machinery on our property for a long time, and we had to incorporate that into how we farmed.
“And an off-take had to be moved.
“We had a farm plan done, and that enabled us to reconfigure laneways and paddocks.”
While they had troughs in some of their paddocks, they have since invested in water troughs for cattle in every paddock.
“When the new pipeline was built across our farm, it was installed with regular outlets along it,” Raelene said.
“So we’ve been able to connect clean water from the Weir to troughs in every paddock.
“It’s also reliable for stock year-round, because the cows can’t drink it dry.
“That gives us water security for the cattle.”
In 2024 Dennis and their son Jacob made it a priority to install two-inch pipe underground, along fencelines, to connect all the troughs, in readiness for the new irrigation season.
“We started calving on August 1 and then the irrigation season opened on August 15,” Dennis said.
“We had to do it now [in winter] while we have time.”
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